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AUTHOR: R Quinn on 6/13/2025
As much as I hate to admit it and exercise regular self-denial, I am old. All the signs are there, my date of birth for one, right in the middle of WWII. There are maybe ten of us born in 1943. Actually 2.9 million of which about 50% can still read HD.
I take the occasional nap-unintentionally though. I bother people by engaging in conversation and telling stories, my grandchildren call me Pa. Actually nowadays my children do as well.
But the most obvious sign – as long as I don’t look in the mirror- is a decline in my appetite. It’s not a clinical thing or extreme which can happen, I just fill up with less. Actually it’s common for older people to eat less, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “anorexia of aging.” That sounds rather dire, but the fact is as people age, their metabolism slows down and they often become less physically active – note nap reference, meaning they require fewer calories to maintain their weight.
The only things about me that are as physically active as in my younger years are my typing fingers – both of them.
All this has resulted in a fridge full of leftovers, much from restaurants. Tonight my dining choices include leftover Chinese or leftover eggplant parmigiana. It’s been a busy week. I’m going with the Chinese as it’s a day older than the Italian.
Unless we are in a fine dining establishment we have taken to asking for take away boxes before being served. We put the soon to be leftovers in the boxes before we eat. It’s neater that way. I haven’t figured out how to successfully and discreetly unbox if we miscalculated and want to eat more.
We have not and will not split an entree although we do order one desert on occasion often at the urging of the server – better one than none. Last week we went to dinner with cousins. Connie and I each ordered a meal and cousins split a salad. I was embarrassed- yeah, I know, why? It made me feel like a glutton with my chicken gumbo meal. If you are going out to dinner, have dinner.
Have you noticed there is very little food you can buy just sufficient for two? I understand why, but it’s still annoying and it helps to add to leftovers. We like cranberry sauce with chicken dishes, but you can only get a 15 oz can. They used to make a can half that size, but no more. So now after a chicken dinner, the plastic wrapped dish with cranberries sits in the fridge until we figure out what to eat it with – or throw it out.
I was looking for Cheerios the other day. All they had were the family size box. I’ll be eating honey nut Cheerios for six months, long past the “Best By” date – an estimate of declining taste quality, not safety.
The cohort life expectancy, which attempts to account for improvements in mortality over a person’s lifetime, says for people born in 1943 it is 71.7 years. Good thing those “use by” and “best by” dates are bad guesses.
Getting old can be frustrating.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
I thoroughly enjoyed this column – dripping with humor every step of the way. I love it! As for me – I grew up eating left overs, so its a natural state for me (unlike my bride). My mom would reuse left overs on nights when dad was working late… until I became a teenager and learned to forage for myself in the fridge – and then somehow, the left overs she was counting on seemed to simply vanish. Its a mystery. . So mom took to putting a piece of masking tape with a NO written on it – which is supposed to prevent it from vanishing. All the way until that fateful day, someone (not me) removed it to get to something behind it in the fridge and in the process of putting the left over back in – accidentally rotated the dish, so when I went to foraging, I pull it out and see the piece of tape that says “ON.” Hmmm. thats very strange… it was consumed. From then on Mom would write on the tape NO! That had the desired effect of cutting down on the foraging. Smith Smallwood
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Who remembers those well proportioned boxes of Kellog cereal that you cut opened the side and pierced the waxed paper liner. You then added milk and and sugar. When you were done, you craved another box only to be stopped by Mom with that famous saying “you have had enough to eat”. Make a positive difference in someone’s life today. Bill Mitchell
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